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Christmas for Bush, But What Can We Hope For?

December 15th, 2003

You know the news, of course, unless you’ve been hiding in a “spider-hole” in Iraq. Bush is presently on the air, doing his expected crowing over this PR boon. The question is, what impact will it have? Bush just announced that, now that Saddam is in custody, the Baathist uprising is over, and there is no hope for their return to power. That, of course, is just slightly jumping the gun. While Saddam may have been moving from location to location, it is highly unlikely that he was frequenting some command and control center and leading the struggle personally; and it is dangerous to assume that Saddam is necessary to any uprising, as if there is no other leader the Baathists could follow, or that if they do maintain such intense loyalty to Saddam and not just their own power structure, or that the imprisonment of Saddam might not prompt them to step up their attacks.

There is a settling that will occur. Bush now has Saddam as a plaything and can do what he wants with him, parading him out before tribunals, stringing out trials until the next election, or, if he prefers, forcing a quick trial and execution. But then there is the bloodshed in Iraq, and if our soldiers continue to die, Bush could find Saddam to be, well, irrelevant. Saddam’s capture will definitely give Bush a short-term boost, but the benefit will only be maintained if–as we all certainly hope–this somehow stops the Baathist attacks, settles the question of WMDs, and allows Iraq to stabilize so we can stop spending so much money and bring our troops home. But if Saddam stays silent, the WMD, if any, stay missing, and the attacks continue, then capturing Saddam may be just as relevant to the war in Iraq as ESPN’s firing Rush Limbaugh was relevant to the NFL.

And that brings us back to a larger topic, which is the relevance of Iraq to America; was it really necessary to go in there in the first place? Was this not, as Wesley Clark has suggested, a side-show to the “war on terror”? But then again, we have all known from the start that the “war on terror” is one of those Orwellian endless wars; we can never hope to get rid of terrorists, alas.

The best we can hope for now is that Iraq settles down and we stop losing so many of our people, that we stop killing others. I am not one to wish for calamity for the sake of bringing down a politician I hate; I would rather see Bush re-elected than have Iraq go on as it is (as intensely painful as four more years of Bush might be). But experience has taught me to be a bit cautious about celebrating a victory when only a superficial goal has been achieved. The mission has still not been accomplished quite yet.

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